In September 1994, if you were a Black poet or needed assurance that Black poetry and its writers were not extinct but alive, crafting, publishing, teaching and flourishing, then the inaugural Furious Flower Poetry Conference was the place to be. And James Madison University (JMU) in Virginia’s scenic Shenandoah Valley was the destination.
Dr. Joanne V. Gabbin orchestrated the Furious Flower conference. She dedicated it to Gwendolyn Brooks, the late Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and her mentor. Gabbin says she expected about 100 to attend. Instead, more than 1,000 showed up for what was likely the largest gathering of Black poets and literary scholars in U.S. history.
Since that first decade-defining gathering 25 years ago, Furious Flower has grown into an internationally recognized center for the study and preservation of Black poetry. By 2004, with JMU’s recognition growing as a hub for Black poetry and poets, the university’s then-president proposed a center dedicated to this work. A year later, in 2005, Furious Flower became the country’s first academic center for Black poetry, and Gabbin its executive director and founder. In 2016, the Center for African
American Poetry and Poetics at the University of Pittsburgh became the second such center dedicated to the study and legacy of African-American poetry and to operate with institutional support.
At JMU, Gabbin named the poetry center and the conference Furious Flower, from a line in a Brooks’ poem, “The Second Sermon on the Warpland.”
“I see Furious Flower’s singular contribution as providing a space where Black poetry is valued, respected and celebrated without regard to the established literary architects who have sometimes ignored its significance,” said Gabbin, who has been a professor and administrator at JMU since 1985. “Black poetry is on the world stage and Furious Flower has helped it to get there.”
Diverse spoke with Gabbin and Lauren K. Alleyne — assistant director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, an English professor at JMU, and a poet — about what’s trending in the careers and making of Black poets and the challenges that come with doing the time-honored work of memorializing Black lives and amplifying Black voices.
